Our 'Pie Chart' flyer for
fiscal year 2013, 'Wall St=War St.',
is available for sale or download on our website. This year we look at the top
military contractors and big corporations that are making a killing off of killing.
Buy bulk color copies or download here. There's still time to order 'Pie
Charts' for Tax Day (April 17). For rush orders email wrl@warresisters.org.

Hand out the 'Pie Chart' at your local Occupy, vigils and
events before and on Tax Day. It's a great conversation starter. Most people in the US do not realize that
approximately half of the income tax money pays for war. Check it out on
our website. http://www.warresisters.org/node/1325

The 99% needs our tax money to work for us, not to enrich
the war profiteers!

Over the past three years you helped us create and
distribute the Rethink Afghanistan series.
The success of this project is outlined here: Rethink Afghanistan: Study
of Effectiveness and Messaging Success. http://rethinkafghanistan.com/then-and-now.php

We need your support now for a new project to fight the
pervasive, corroding effects of ongoing militarism and endless warfare. Our new
campaign is called War Costs. We will highlight the
Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex that wastes your tax dollars,
encourages more violence and lines the pockets of a defense industry that has
shamelessly profited from a decade of war all while asking for more money.

Your support will allow War Costs to mount a day-in-day-out
assault on a Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex that insists we maintain
5,000 nuclear weapons that cost $54 billion a year total. http://www.ploughshares.org/sites/default/files/resources/What%20We%20Spend%20on%20Nuclear%20Weapons%20092811.pdf Our investigative films are currently in
production. We plan to release the first of these in early next year; that film
will examine how the government’s war on transparency and the whistleblowers
that reveal waste and abuse in the system leads to a curbing of free press and
First Amendment rights.

Donate $25 to help us produce more videos and push this
content to the mainstream media. Your donations will also allow us to continue
our investigations and to create more content holding the Pentagon accountable.

With your help and support, let’s show the profiteers and
warmongers we have the power. As always, we cannot win this fight without you!

Thank you,

Robert Greenwald

“The Costs of War
Project: Linda Bilmes and Andrew
Bacevich,”

Veterans for Peace (Winter 2012).

The
following reports are transcriptions

of
video talks by Professor Linda Bilmes

and
Professor Andrew Bacevich as part of

the
Eisenhower Research Group’s Costs of

War
Project based at BrownUniversity’s

Watson
Institute for International Studies

(www.costsofwar.org).
The videos are available

at
http://vimeo.com/27254292 (Professor

Bilmes)
and http://vimeo.com/27457922

(Professor
Bacevich; the transcriptions

are
reproduced here with the permission of

Professor
Bilmes and Professor Bacevich.

Professor
Bilmes’s full research paper is

available
at www.costsofwar.org/article/

caring-us-veterans
The Editor.

When
you look at the costs of the Iraq

and Afghanistan
conflicts, the numbers

published
by the government are about

$1.3
trillion, but this is just the tip of the

iceberg
because this is just money that has

already
been spent. There are other costs

yet to come, one of the most significant of

which
is for providing medical care for the

young
Americans who have been deployed

to
Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been

2.2
million Americans who have fought in

these
wars, 1.2 million have come home

and
are now veterans. Of these returned

veterans more than 600,000 have been

treated
in veteran hospitals and facilities for

a
wide variety of ailments, ranging from

mental
health disorders, musculoskeletal

disorders,
skin disorders, hearing loss, and

other
injuries that were either sustained or

exacerbated
during their service. These are

costs
that we are just beginning to pay right

now,
but they are costs that will be growing

over
the next 20, 30, 40 years, and they

will add another $600 billion to $1 trillion

in
cost just for caring for our veterans over

and
above what we’ve already spent.

It
is important to look at the full cost of

war
because if you use poor accounting,

which
is what the government uses, you

don’t
get a real sense of what things cost.

For
example, if I sell you a car for $20,000

and when you look at the fine print it costs

$40,000,
you might have second thoughts

about
buying that car. That’s essentially

what
we’ve done with the Iraq and
Afghanistan

conflicts. Congress has voted on

one
quotation of how much it would cost,

but
the real cost is much larger. Particularly

in
the case of the care for our veterans we

haven’t
set aside money to care for them so

we
have incurred a long-term obligation to

provide medical care and disability benefits

for
our wounded veterans without setting

any
provision for how we’re going to

pay
for it. What we need is an accounting

system
that is based on accrual accounting

that
makes transparent the true costs of war.

It’s
only with a fully transparent accounting

system
and budgetary systems that those in

power
can really make decisions because as

of
now they don’t actually have the data to

understand
how much we’re actually paying

on
any military activity. There are two

decisions
that have to be made in regard

to every conflict: one is whether to get involved

in
it; the second is how to pay for it

if
you do. In the case of Iraq
and Afghanistan,

we have for the first time in United

States
history since the revolutionary war

borrowed
virtually all of the money that

had been used to pay for these conflicts.

This
has added at least $1.5 trillion to our

national
debt.

At
this point, I think the questions that

we
should be asking are whether if not for

the
decision to invade Iraq,
would we still

be
mired in Afghanistan?,
would oil prices

be
what they are?, would the national debt

be as high as it is?, and would the financial

crisis
be as severe as it was? I think arguably

the
answers to all four of these questions

is
no. The Iraq
war has been tragic in

many
respects but from a purely economic

sense
it has been tragic in that we have

spent
money that we could have invested

in
education, in our infrastructure, paying

off
our debt, and other activities rather than

on activities that have very low benefit economically

speaking
and which have added

a
great deal to our national debt.

Linda
J. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick

Moynihan
Senior Lecturer in Public Policy

at
HarvardUniversity’s
KennedySchool.

She
is the author with Professor Joseph Stiglitz

of
the book The Three Trillion Dollar

War:
The True Cost of the Iraq
Conflict.

There
is an immense and urgent requirement

to
learn from the experience of the

past
decade, to learn why the global war on

terror
has been such a costly disappointment,

to
learn why the Iraq
war produced

results
so radically different from what was

expected,
to learn why the Afghanistan
war

is
now the longest war in our history. It

is
crucially important to tally up the costs

of
war to properly assess the wisdom or

unwisdom
of the policies that landed us in

war in the first place. At a bare minimum

we’ve
already spent $1 trillion, and there

are
reasonable projections that we will end

up
spending $2 trillion, $3 trillion, perhaps

as much as $6 trillion. This at a time when

the
American economy is not performing

well
and when the debt is going through the

roof.

Not
to be lost of course is the question

of
the human costs paid by non-Americans,

not
simply by our allies but the people of

Iraq,
the people of Afghanistan,
and the

people
of Pakistan, of Yemen,
and many

other
places across the Islamic world. We

know
that there have been something on

the
order of two to two-and-a-half million

Iraqis
who are living in exile; a large

number
of other Iraqis who have been displaced

from
their homes. Were something

like
this to happen in the United
States, we

would
view it as an catastrophe of historic

magnitude.
The population displaced by

the
global war on terror is, for example,

far
larger than the population displaced by

Hurricane
Katrina.

Wars
create distortions, in our politics,

in
our economy. War concentrates power;

war delivers profit to certain people and

imposes sacrifices on others. I think those

distortions
have happened in the global

war
on terror launched after 9/11. To some

degree,
they have been hidden or concealed;

they’ve
been hidden in part by our

unwillingness
to actually pay for many of

the
costs, at least the economic costs of

the
war. The willingness to simply go ever

deeper
in debt, to shove off the economic

costs
onto future generations, that’s one

of
the things that actually blind us to the

actual
impact of the wars we’ve been conducting.

I would like to see the equivalent of
the

9/11 Commission be undertaken and focus

on what we might call the long war: The

Commission to Study the Long War.
Public

hearings; testimony by officials, participants

both
soldiers and civilians, by people

who
lost loved ones on 9/11, by historians

and
journalists. There should be a comprehensive

effort
to understand what’s

happened since the United States went to

war against so-called terrorism.
I think

The
Costs of War Project could make an

important
contribution to the larger effort to

divine
the truth.

Andrew
Bacevich is a graduate of West

Point,
a retired US Army Colonel, a Professor

of
History and International Relations

at
BostonUniversity, and author most

recently of Washington Rules: America’s Path
to Permanent War.

All War IS Local By S. Brian Willson

September 12, 2012 [Dick:
I read this in VFP, The War Crimes
Times (Winter 2013)].

“A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense [sic] than on programs of
social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Time To Break Silence,” April 4,
1967, Riverside Church, New York City

Introduction

On a recent visit to my neighborhood library
in SE Portland, Oregon, I was asked outside the entrance if
I would sign a petition to place a public school bond measure on the fall
ballot. Though I support full funding of public schools, I balked. Knowing that
Portland libraries are also planning to place a taxing district on the same
ballot, I felt fury building up inside of me at how obscene, lawless military
spending is sucking our nation’s resources dry. I told the person asking for my
signature that I would only sign such petition when and if the Portland School
Board, Portland City Commissioners and Mayor, and all other City and County
entities become part of an active anti-war movement to stop the looting of our
Commons by the Military-Industrial-Banking-Congressional-Presidential Complex.

DIRECT costs are FELT only by a small percentage of the public

The US
wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Yemen, Somalia, etc.,
are, in reality, only viscerally experienced by a small percentage of the US
American people. No direct taxes on the people have been assessed to fund the
wars. They are funded instead by debt. And the absence of general conscription
(a military draft) relieves the vast majority of the population from the
emotional burden of worrying whether a family member will be forced into
military service.

Ade factoeconomic draft exists whereby those
unable to find adequate employment in our economically depressed society are
offered a subsidized job track in the military, and trained as combatants or
placed in any number of supportive roles in imperial adventures around the
globe.

But most members of US society have
gone about their lives business as usual, experiencing little anxiety or
hardship, indeed, hardly “feeling” the wars.

INDIRECT costs severely affect the 99 percent

However, even though the direct,
experiential costs of US wars have been largely absent in popular discussion
and politically unaccounted for, the resulting residual costs are enormous. The
national resource base has been so severely drained by war costs that we are in
domestic “austerity” budgeting. An audit of the Federal Reserve has revealed
$16 trillion in secret loans to bail out US American and foreign banks and
businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. That is
equivalent to our National Debt. That amounts to more than $50,000 for every
man, woman and child, enough to revive a healthy main street. Meanwhile four
million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosures due to massive collusion
between Wall Street and banks in granting fraudulent mortgages. Every
foreclosed homeowner could have been publicly refinanced instead.

These arenon-humancosts. Thehumancosts in Iraq
and Afghanistan lives, not
to mention public and private military forces and mercenaries from the US, is immense.
The websiteUnknown Newsestimates
total Iraqis killed (murdered) since the US invasion in 2003 at about 895,000,
with another 1,646,000 injured (maimed). The comparable figures for Afghanistan are
17,400 killed (murdered) and 41,625 injured (maimed). US public and private
military and mercenaries, plus “Coalition” troops and journalists killed in Iraq is
slightly over 5,800, with nearly 45,000 injured. The comparable figures for Afghanistan are
2,230 killed, and 8,164 injured. Thus,total war
casualties are nearly 2,670,000– over 920,000 killed; nearly
1,750,000 injured.

In the last ten years nearly 2.5 million US soldiers have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. They come from every
town, city and rural area in the country, but reports suggest a
disproportionate number of the dead and wounded come from small town USA. Up to 50
percent of those deployed to Afghanistan
and Iraq
have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain
injury (TBI), or have been victims of military sexual trauma (MST). Treatment
costs for returning veterans are immense. Over one million have applied for
compensation for injuries.

War drains domestic financial and mental
capacity to address critical needs for health care, education, social security,
etc., ineverycommunity. The outrageous
amount of money being siphoned into the military industrial complex, with wars
feeding obscene profits to its architects, seriously threatens assurance of
resources for a healthy society. US citizens should be assured of a
social safety net for all. Instead, US Americans are guaranteed adebt in
perpetuity. Meanwhile, the rich get richer; the poor get
poorer.

Despite the lack of national discourse on
military spending, war is always on our minds. It is promoted in holiday
festivities such as Memorial Day, Armistice Day (now called Veteran’s Day),
Independence Day and Patriots Day. There are fund drives for soldiers,
homecomings, recruitment ads, military band concerts, war video games in every
town and city, army-sponsored race cars, war movies and television shows, and
war toys. Numerous colleges and universities receive millions in funding from
the Department of War (euphemistically called “Defense”) for academic research.

And money for the military and wars totally
dominates the entire national budget which in turn deleteriously impacts every
political jurisdiction and local economy in the country. Ironically, our
extravagant military budget is rarely questioned but cuts for domestic programs
are constantly discussed.

The argument that military spending creates
jobs is a red herring. A report conducted by the Political Economy Research
Institute reveals that every billion dollars of government spending on the
military creates 12,000 jobs. But a choice to create tax cuts for the poor
would stimulate personal consumption and create 15,000 jobs. The same billion
dollars would create 18,000 jobs in assuring health care, 25,000 jobs in
education, 27,700 in mass transit.

In effect, grotesque war spending means less
money for:

1.elementary &
secondary education;

2.grants in aid to
states and localities;

3.home energy
assistance for low Income households;

4.HIV/AIDS;

5.community block
grants;

6.special education and
assistance for the disadvantaged;

7.school improvement;

8.loss of funds for
vocational and adult education;

9.supplemental
nutrition WIC program;

10.children and family
Services;

11.Head Start;

12.rental assistance
vouchers;

13.children served by
childcare assistance;

14.etc.

The National
Priorities Projectestimates
of actual cost of recent US
wars at over $1,372 Trillion dollars can be broken down for each community.

For Portland,
Oregon (http://costofwar.com/state/OR/city/portland/)
the cost is nearly $1,794,000,000 (Billion). The 2012 US Census estimates Portland’s population at
600,000. Thus the cost of the wars foreachman, woman, and child in Portland is about $3,000,
with costs continuing to escalate. If the estimated, projected higher national
costs reach $4.4 Trillion, or $6 Trillion are calculated, costs to Portland could reach $5,700,000,000
($9,500 for each Portlander), or perhaps nearly $7,800,000,000 ($13,000 for
each Portlander).

Fifty million US Americans now live in
poverty with one on every seven requiring food stamps to survive each month.
Over 125,000 of Portlanders, or over 20% of the city’s population, are on food
stamps. Over 15,000 people in Portland
experience homelessness during the year.

The National Debt now stands at nearly $16
Trillion, or $50,000 for every man, woman and child. Each of us is in perpetual
debt.

And the disparity between Haves and
Have-Nots is felt globally as Occupy has protested austerity measures being
felt by much of the world. A study by the Green Party of England discloses that
the same global capitalist economic policies that are polluting the planet
while depleting its finite resources, have allowed a mere 400 billionaires to
acquire assets equal to the combined wealth of 45% of the world’s population.

Immoral and illegal wars created by a corrupt political economy

In addition to direct and indirect costs,
these US-led wars are illegal on their face. They make a mockery of our moral
and legal authority as a nation, and reveal that in fact we are a nation of
(lawless) men, not of law. Over 2,670,000 human beings have been killed or
maimed as the consequences of these recent criminal wars in violation of
international law, staining further our national character.

The illegality and immorality of these wars,
conducted with no accountability or plausible justification, breed a corruption
at the top political levels of society that permeates into every aspect of
society. Our corrupt economic institutions are profiting obscenely from
policies of mass murder.

No war was declared as required by the US
Constitution. The United Nations (UN) Charter to which the US is a
signatory, allows military action in only two instances: (1) if authorized by
the UN Security Council, or (2) if undertaken in self-defense against an
existing or imminent armed attack. Neither of these conditions were met or
sought. Under Article VI, Clause 2, of the US Constitution, the provisions of
the UN Charter are incorporated into the Supreme Law of the Land of the United States, and therefore the US violated
both the UN Charter, and its own Constitution.

In fact they are Nuremberg-type crimes,
meaning they are the worst of the worst in terms of national and political
criminality.

I know a bit about this criminal pattern. In
1969 I was commander of a US Air Force combat security unit in Viet Nam where
I witnessed a series of atrocities wiping out entire inhabited and undefended
fishing villages. These were international crimes committed by both US and
South Vietnamese forces under US
command. That war cost US taxpayers nearly $740 Billion in today’s dollars [http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22926.pdf]
as it diabolically claimed more than 5 Million lives, 99 percent of whom were
innocent Southeast Asia peasants.

The seven leaked confidential British
Downing Street Memos, dated from March to July 2002, disclose a US and British
drive to war a full year before the March 2003 invasion. “War was now seen as
inevitable,” while “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”
seeking “regime change” without any “basis under international law.” The memos
also declared: “There is no recent evidence of Iraq
complicity with international terrorism…There is no credible evidence to link Iraq with Usama
Bin Laden.” Regarding Iraq’s
possession of WMD, the “intelligence is poor.” [“The Downing
Street Reader: A cheat sheet on the memos behind the scandal,”The Rolling Stone Blog,June 22, 2005].

The US has been in a virtual permanent
war economy since World War II. Increasingly the political economy requires
permanent enemies, and functions to assure their creation. Thus, the entire US
American system has a vested interest in a permanent state of tension.

The citizens of the US, in their
participation through their Congress, President, and their huge military
industrial complex, spend more money on their military than any other nation –
45% of the entire world’s expenditures, more than the next 14 nations combined.

The dramatically increasing disparity between the Haves and the
Have Nots in the US has become
more grotesque since September 2001. As choices to commit outrageous monies for
military and war spending have skyrocketed, choices to fund a healthy and just
domestic society have disappeared:

3.A mere six of the
Walmart heirs themselves have wealth equal to that of the entire bottom 30%.[Joseph Stiglitz, “The 1 Percent's Problem,”Vanity
Fair,May 31, 2012:
“Why won’t America’s 1 percent—such as the six Walmart heirs, whose wealth
equals that of the entire bottom 30 percent—be a bit more . . . selfish?”
Adapted fromThe Price of Inequality,by Joseph
Stiglitz, to be published in June by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (U.S.), and in
July by Allen Lane (U.K.)]

The impact of inequality on individuals and
society is well established. Social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson concludes
that, “the quality of social relations in societies is related to the scale of
income inequality –how big the gap is between rich and poor. More unequal
societies tend to have higher rates of violent crime and homicide, and that
people living in them feel more hostility, are less likely to be involved in
community life, and are much less likely to trust each other; in short they
have lower levels of social capital… Inequality is deeply corrosive…Greater
inequality is perhaps the most significant obstacle to the development of an
environmentally sustainable level of economic activity.” [Richard Wilkinson (a
social epidemiologist),The Impact of Inequality, The New
Press, 2005, pp. 24-30].

The Nation is Now Paying the Price; Localities Need to Become
Part of Anti-War Movement

The US has doubled its national debt
during these wars, making every US American alive todayindebted in perpetuity.
The domestic budget is being severely cut, requiring draconian cutbacks in
education, libraries, medical care such as it is, all social safety net
programs, fire and police departments, all city services, etc. Portland’s Fiscal Year 2012-13 budget is
nearly $2.85 billion, 3.8% less than the previous year. “Austerity” budgets are
being imposed all over the US
(and the world) largely due to siphoning of national wealth into wars and the
military industrial complex.

This is whyeverypolitical leader, and all citizens in
every jurisdiction – towns, cities, counties and states, and every functional
entity within cities, counties and states such as schools and libraries, need
to become ardent and loud opponents of the national war and military policy
that is enriching the military industrial complex at everyone’s expense. Local
communities desperately seek new funds through bond issues and new taxes as
programs are being cut. The local people are being asked to pay for the war
boondoggles of the rich – private profit, public decay.

Unless everyone gets behind a national
popular movement to end the wars, and to severely restrict the Pentagon budget,
we as a nation will simply keep eroding into what we call a “Third World”
country where a very tiny minoritycontrol the lives of the vast majority. A
neofeudalism, if you will. Fewer and fewer local residents will be able to
afford increased property taxes imposed by bond issues or other local tax
increases to keep local jurisdictions afloat as the war economy sucks the
nation dry.

War is a local issue! If and when people
understand this we the people possess a political opportunity to reclaim our
people’s republic. Short of that, we collapse while on our knees with hardly a
whisper.

This is one of the
most impressive reads I have ever come across; your knowledge and understanding
of the facts is exceeded only by your courage.I am a christian lay minister and
who also knows the complicit role that religion has played in the problem and
continues to do so. The next step has to be for men and women like yourself to
form the intentional communities made up of people who know the truth and are
of the same mind. That call is the only thing I’ve found missing on this site.
Please let me know if I have missed it; because I would love to participate.

A professional networking site for individuals &
organizations worldwide involved in development, conflict resolution and
related fields.

A fight we can't afford to
lose

Kevin Martin, Peace
Action 12-20-11to jbennet

peaceact@mail.democracyinaction.org

Dear James,

First, let me thank you for your actions and financial
support over the past year. With your help, the peace movement succeeded at
last in bringing our troops home from Iraq,
and opposition to the terrible war in Afghanistan is growing stronger.
And, with your support, Peace Action launched Move the Money, our campaign to
build common cause with labor and other economic justice groups to reorder
federal spending priorities, putting our tax dollars to work for jobs, not war.

Together, we’ve made sure our demands to end runaway
military spending can no longer be brushed aside by Tea Party compliant Hawks
simply uttering the words ‘threat to national security.” While not nearly sufficient, Congress did cut
military spending this year. We must now set our sights on making even more
substantial progress in the year ahead.

I hope you will join me in achieving our goals for 2012 with
a year end gift to Peace Action or a tax-deductible gift to Peace Action
Education Fund.

The government we elect next November will likely set the
economic and political agenda for decades to come. Make no mistake, sooner or later they will
make a decision on how to deal with the economy. Will they decide to end the war in
Afghanistan, cut runaway military spending, and make sure the super-rich pay
their fair share, or will they cut Social Security and Medicare and balance the
budget on the backs of working people?
The gridlock and inaction will not last forever.

Our opponents are relentless and well funded. They’ve been
trying for decades to unravel the social safety net and roll back the
regulations that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we
eat. This challenge, as daunting as it
is, must be met with sufficient grassroots pressure to defeat this agenda and
put our country on a path to a peaceful and just future.

Peace Action’s
campaign to Move the Money will frame our issues on our terms, ensuring our
elected representatives and candidates for office focus on the human and economic costs of the war and the
waste, fraud and abuse in the Pentagon budget. Our Peace Voter activists are already at work
in key states like New Hampshire and North Carolina,
bird-dogging candidates and posing challenging questions about the corrupting
influence of organized money in politics, an endless war and the $662 billion
Pentagon budget Congress just approved.

This is a fight we cannot afford to lose.

You can support Peace Action’s work for SANE economic
policies using our secure online giving portal.

Thank you again for your attention and work on these
important issues and for your kind consideration of this request.